Making black and white images for older phones in PhotoShop

Making a monochrome phone picture in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop 7.0+ will save your design as a WBMP file

LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP (OR YOUR PICTURE DOES)...

Before you start to put work into a monochrome wbmp, remember your picture is going to have to leap twice. You'll have to know how you are going to:

1. transfer your message picture from your desktop to your mobile phone.

2. send the message on from your phone to your recipient, (or post the image up as an operator logo).

You do have a number of ways to transfer your image from Photoshop to phone, for instance wirelessly by bluetooth, as an email attachment or even with a cable.

Make sure, however, that if you want to use the graphic as a picture message, your phone doesn't jib at sending it on to the final recipient by wap.

You also have to make sure your recipient's phone will be able to receive and display your wbmp picture message. (Sigh!) ..

Colour images to newer phones by multimedia messaging are so much easier.

Sorry, but here we are dealing only with old-style black-and-white WBMPs, so if you really have to make one of these, experiment, and when you're ready......

...MAKE THE PICTURE

1. In Photoshop, select File - New.

A mobile phone message picture for older phones is most usually 72 pixels wide by 28 high. It will have to end as a monochrome bitmap, but choose to edit it in Greyscale as you'll have more options.

An old style Nokia operator logo is half the height at 14 pixels.

2. Open the Navigator toolbar and blow up the image with the slider or click the triangle at the end for percentage increases. Increase the magnification to several hundred times.

3. Go to View - Show - Grid and turn on the grid. Then go to Photoshop - Preferences - Guides, Grid & Slices. Choose a grid spacing of one pixel. This will give you some 'graph paper' showing the pixels you have to work on.

4. Go to the toolbox and select the Pencil tool. Make it one pixel wide in the 'Brush' box (on the adjustment bar above the tool panel).

5. Now go down to the Color Picker (the two pairs of overlapping squares below the tools) and click on the black-and-white pair. This will convert the other duo - your current foreground and background colours - to monochrome.

Click on the colour square you want to use as your foreground - in other words your 'ink'.

There's one advantage to working with only two colours. You can switch to the background (or 'paper') colour for quick erasing.

6. Go ahead and draw. If you use the eraser in the Toolbox, make sure it's in Pencil erasing mode. A third way to erase is to go back a stage by clicking on a previous action in your History palette. Actually it's quicker just to draw in the background colour.

Preview your image often at 100% - and avoid the temptation to add too much detail.

With grayscale available, it's also possible to make a shaded image, or even use the paint brush. But bear in mind that when saving in only two colours, your subtle shading will be converted to a sprinkling of black pepper! You'll probably get a better effect by drawing in monochrome right from the start.

7. When you've done, click File - Save for Web. A new display will appear. Choose to save as WBMP. Your picture will be saved in two colours, black and white. If your artwork does have greyscale shading, experiment with various percentages of dither.

8. When you have a result that looks good, save your image. Now your mobile phone message picture can be sent by WAP 2.

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Making a black and white phone picture in Photoshop

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